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Critical Review on the Cartographic Command Center &
Urban Map Hack Workshop
at the Dutch Electronic Art Festival 2004

Surveillance and Technology

The Cartographic Command Center (CCC) sets up on the promise that with the availability of mobile wireless technology for consumers, the "civil society [...] obtains the information advantage enjoyed by the secret services, the army or the police"1. The consequences were that "everyone can watch everyone else with equal opportunity"1.
Apart from the dubiety of the whish to achieve such a state, I am wondering if these statements might negate existing power differentials?
It could be useful to draw a parallel to media and video activism, another tactical 'discipline' grown with the arise of consumer electronics (including access to the internet): while it was and is possible to empower 'own' products and networks, it remains questionable how far a disempowerment of existing, regnant mass media channels is taking place. Quite contrary to the development and emergence of own aesthetics, own ways to handle data, information, knowledge, communication, consciousness etc. there is always an aspect of integration into existing systems present. That is becoming visible by discussions about the benefit of using such mass media news channels to spread the 'own information': the setting of communication gets accepted or even adopted to spread the (not) so different 'information'. What emerges is an alternative, but not 'own' or 'sovereign'2 media system.
To come back to the Cartographic Command Center, where I can see touches of similar ideas: I consider a fortification of existing (e.g. surveillance) systems by their adoption possible. More concrete I mean that hyping GPS (global positioning system) for artistic projects often does not question existing power differentials, but strengthens the roles of technology in let them emerge and contributes to a wider acceptance of them. GPS stays controlled/defined by governments and military, why I would call for projects to question such technologies or even destabilize them and their established use instead of just using them in their designed ways.

Body

Not only since the revival of the artificial intelligence debate machines — maybe technology in general — have/s been used for a long time to reflect on human beings identity and body. Nowadays the parallels between computer and human brains already sound a bit old-fashioned as networks and open systems are some of the metaphors replacing them. Some decades ago the kind of new telephone distributing centers were a main model of understanding functioning of the human brain. And many years before Hobbes stated that life emerges by the interaction of different moving technical objects.
Of course this are only a few examples, but they might point out that technology and modes of understanding human beings are working in an interplay.
This reflection is one aspect of the BioMapping project, where a device measures your excitement or stress - in a quite simple, and probably not very reliable way (galvanic skin response) - and relates these data to geographic places. The open question if you shall trust your own, non-mediated feelings and memories or the device collecting data with a sort of mediated distance, must probably be answered by everybody individually. For me what lacks is the absence of making the measurement of feeling a concrete subject of discussion; is technology necessary to reflect about the own identity or does it even change the body itself? The consequence of merging together all the individual data records into one map to me looks like trying to create an average of something that is not doable without a more collective process. Personal feelings are different from wireless network access points, whose data got collected by the FRIDA V. project.

Contradictory for me was the term of the "command center" and the role of the visitor. I think the title makes associations with the identity of a commander while the nice control panel puts the user more into the role of an configurator or observer than commander. But to be able becoming a co-director of the visualizations by taking a ride with the FRIDA V. bike or a walk with a BioMapping set actually compensates this small gap. Due to the necessity of taking it out of the exhibition to get results and experiences, FRIDA V. was one of my personal highlights. Unfortunately the consistency between the rides and the visualization/mapping at the Cartographic Command Center was not that high.

Mapping Ideology

Sadly the Radar&Radio segment of the Urban Map Hack Workshop did not take place in a way that would have allowed to clarify the idea of "open[ing] new possibilities in environmental monitoring technologies for grassroots organisations"3. Due to the absence of a strong dependency (on satellites whose data gathering is defined by others) not inevitable working with GPS, radar&radio technologies seem to be opener for redefinitions.
An interesting point for me is to focus on the gap between immediate and mediated perception. To change the medium/media always — from human senses, over global positioning to radar et al. — opens an interesting space, worth exploring.
In a strange way that is the point hit during the "Open Brunch - Sensing Location"4 when a project was presented which implements a mobile device that calls your attention when you should disengage from it to have a look to your beautiful environment.
An exemplarily project is Geograffiti. It enables the users to virtually attach messages to specific places respectively their position/coordinates, for example to have them read by other users. On the one hand it can be seen as an opening of occupying new spaces and on the other hand it can be interpreted as avoiding conflicts by moving interventionist/interfering messages visible for everybody to a virtual space where they don't disturb anyone.
Even if it should have been a counter-example I am not sure how much such a vision differs from the one proposed by HP's cooltwon project5.

After have touched some of the very interesting questions posed by the Cartographic Command Center - and that is why I liked the project(s) even if (or because) I do not agree with all of its aspects -, for further discussions personally I would be interested in concluding questions as follows:
- Is "codifying space"6 always related with domination of power, exclusive structure and creation of elitist codes?
- Does a map also write and create stories (instead of only telling them)? For example the one that there are things like countries? 1, 7
- How different are the stories told by maps from below?

{Fabian Voegeli}

Sources and Footnotes

#1 "MC3: Mobile Cartographic Command Center" on gpster.net
#2 "Hör zu – oder stirb!" in german: (maybe english equivalent)
#3 Call for radar&radio segment at the urban map hack workshop
#4 Report by Remco La Rivière on "Open Brunch - Sensing Location"
#5 Cooltown video
#6 Urban Map Hack Workshop call
#7 Of Exactitude in Science (J. L. Borges)